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Frank Ramsey was a remarkable Cambridge philosopher who died very young. He was only 26.

In his short life he produced a slew of brilliant ideas many of which are still discussed.

In this interview in the BioBites thread of Philosophy Bites,

Cheryl Mezak, author of Ramsey's biography, which she's subtitled A sheer excess of powers explores the relationship

between his life and thought.

Shehamehysack, welcome to Philosophy Bites. My pleasure. We're talking today about Frank Ramsey. You've been

on philosophy bites before also talking about Frank Ramsey, but in particular today

we're going to be talking about how his life affected his philosophy.

Let's start by summarising who he was when he lived, how important he was.

Ramsey was, as Paul Samuelson, the economist once said, a genius by any test of genius.

So he died at the age of 26 in 1930.

He was a Cambridge philosopher, economist, and mathematician who really did unbelievable

things in this very short life. There's a branch of combinatoric mathematics named after him, Ramsey Theory.

There are two sub-branches of economics that he really founded, optimal taxation theory and optimal savings theory and in philosophy

we also have a just a ton of things named after him. Ramsey sentences, Ramsey

conditionalization.

My favorite is Donald Davidson's coinage of the term,

Ramsey effect.

The Ramsey effect is when you think

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